The comforts of pampered modernity have gone too far.
RAW WATER IS PROOF THE COMFORTS OF PAMPERED MODERNITY HAVE GONE TOO FAR
Nearly 30 years ago, when the world was still going mad, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes tried to sell Calvin’s Curative Elixir at a roadside stand. When Hobbes objected that it was plainly “dirty water from the drainage ditch,” Calvin tried the slogan “Fortified with chlorophyll” before settling on charging people $1 a glass not to drink from his “Pitcher of Plague.” But in the era of “raw water” the joke is on us.
In case you’re also in hiding from the insanity we call “popular culture,” there’s this new trend where you get healthy by drinking “naturally probiotic” water that hasn’t been treated to remove animal poop. No, I mean to remove essential minerals, ions and, um, animal poop.
The National Post says people aren’t just deliberately drinking unhealthy water for their health, they’re paying nearly $ 10 per litre for non- vintage Eau de Lac. Yet they would riot if asked to pay such a price for gasoline or, indeed, to drink ditch water from their tap.
Many reputable people have leapt up to condemn this fad as obviously unhealthy. But they are getting the same sani- wiped elbow that common sense, authority and pride in past achievement now routinely receive. (Can I just note here that the Oprah for President boom, which in our fastpaced social- media times l asted roughly 17 hours, foundered partly because she rose to fame and fortune peddling outrageous quackery? Donald Trump did not invent or patent contempt for logic and evidence.)
Raw water is hardly the only fad to gain in strength, the more reputable opinion condemns it. And let’s face it; reputable opinion has dug itself a pretty deep hole with its propensity for disregarding evidence and silencing dissent. I don’t just mean in the bad old days. But there must be some kind of golden mean between believing every news story with “ex- perts say” in the headline and refusing to vaccinate your children or boil your water.
Seriously. Raw water? Doesn’t everybody know if you must drink from a tainted source it is vital to cook the stuff first? Tea wasn’t healthy primarily because of the plant’s alleged medicinal properties. Boiling water to make it meant you killed the bacteria … before they killed you.
My late friend Tom Davey, publisher of Environmental Science & Engineering, was routinely i ndignant that people could be induced to pay premium prices for bottled water when safe tap water was the single greatest environmental triumph in human history.
But today some trendies are willing to pay premium prices to avoid safe t ap water, partly on the basis of the same hooey about trace elements that made “mineral” water popular, partly out of paranoia once the purview of anti- fluoridation Red- baiters, and partly out of amazing scientific ignorance including about the presence of vital nutrients in food, especially if you don’t just eat the super- processed kind.
There. I said it. Some of what we ingest is overly processed, relentlessly scientifically improved until it becomes harmful (a problem by no means restricted to food). But some isn’t, including tap water.
I realize safe drinking water was hailed as an achievement back when mainstream environmentalists wanted the planet to be nice for people. Today’s far greater skepticism about whether human and environmental well- being are compatible creates considerable reluctance to make our well- being a significant measure of progress. But I am in the older camp. Without being insensible to the “crowding out” of ecosystems even by flourishing human communities, l et alone poor ones, I still believe we can live well in harmony with nature, and only thus.
Some conservative associates think my deep unease with factory farming requires me to line my hat with tin foil. Other people believe my support for conservatism requires me to line my head with it. But I can only fit so much metal into either, and I draw the line at deliberately drinking the kind of water that used to bring us cholera epidemics.
Would it be impolite to cite this trend as proof that modernity has more money than brains, that the more a life of luxury is delivered to us as a birthright rather than being a hard-won and inherently precarious achievement, the less we are able to count our blessings or act prudently?
By all means save the whales. Get plastic out of the oceans. Protect ugly as well as cute species and their ecosystems. Know that man cannot flourish cut off from nature, and weep at Saruman’s conversion of the Shire from bucolic to industrial in the Lord of the Rings. But you can’t do yourself or the Earth any good while dying of dysentery you brought on yourself by pampered stupidity.
Instead, start each day with Robson’s Curative Elixir. Free from your tap, though I’ ll take the dollar if you feel like sending it.